Ramtron International Corporation, headquartered in Colorado
Springs, Colorado, is a fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops and
markets specialized semiconductor memory and integrated semiconductor solutions
used in a wide range of product applications and markets.

editor's comments:- November 2012 -
Ramtron, which was
acquired by
Cypress Semiconductor
in October 2012 - and is now part of Cypress Semiconductor Memory Products
Division - makes very low capacity nvm using a technology called F-RAM
(ferroelectric random access memory).

In
July 2008 Ramtron confirmed that specific batches of product had
failed due to manufacturing
process
defects in one of its partners fabs. The reason I mention it here is that
when readers ask me about when
other technologies might
replace flash in
SSDs - I cautiously remind
them that there have been many occasions in the past when initially promising
technologies didn't manage to deliver on grounds of scalability or long term
reliability.

The use of hybridizing memory
technologies - for example using faster RAM-like non volatile memory in some
parts of the SSD device and slower flash-like memory in the bulk storage arrays
to accelerate performance inside SSD caches was predicted by
StorageSearch.com several years ago
in various articles including
the Flash SSD Performance
Roadmap.

In November
2004 - Ramtron
announced that its FRAM had been used in an embedded server card called the
Merlin Board
designed by Seventech
and aimed at applications like gaming machines which required fast and secure
data access and where data integrity has to be immune to power dropouts.

"FRAM
memories are similar to SRAMs in that they have fast read/write times, but with
the advantage of
maintaining
data in memory even during power failures," said Salvo De Luca, CEO
of Seventech. "By using FRAM's unique feature set, the Merlino board
elegantly resolves the problem of starting up application programs that are
running on the board during a
power
black-out. We can now restart the software from the exact point at which it was
interrupted."